Session Replay Vs Heatmaps: Which Is Better?

Web analytics plays a key role in the life of any online business. Nowadays, there are plenty of options available to keep you up-to-date on your website.

These can be data visualization tools, built-in measurements, or even manual big data analysis. With these, you can always be aware of the current performance of your website and you can continuously optimize it.

In this article, we will introduce you to two modern data visualization tools, heatmaps and session replay. Let’s see how you can use these and what kind of data they provide.

About heatmaps

Heatmaps are analytical tools that can help you evaluate traffic and examine the efficacy of your website. It is really simple to use simply a few clicks and the device is collecting data.

During the analysis, you will notice red and blue colors. Heatmaps use warm colors to show the most effective areas of your website and cold colors to indicate the least effective.

Heatmaps can be used to design various visual elements. It provides a clear image of which colors or motifs work best on your website.

It can also be quite useful when trying to improve the conversion rate of your webshop. Heatmaps can help you figure out what CTAs to employ in your marketing campaign too. Sounds good right?

Let’s see what kind of heatmaps you can choose:

– Scroll heatmaps

– Click heatmaps

– Segment heatmaps

Scroll heatmaps

Scroll heatmaps have a significant advantage in blog interfaces since it allows you to add links to your items in regions that are likely to be viewed.

Another advantage of employing scroll heatmaps is that it allows you to see the area of the ads that are displayed on your page. In this way, you will be able to place ads in the most popular places.

Click heatmaps

When you want to know how your consumers are using your website, click heatmaps are a great tool to use. It enables you to determine which buttons are most frequently used, which subpages are commonly frequented, and which products make the most conversions.

You can use click heatmaps to see which CTAs are working on your website, and you can utilize them in your ads as well. You also need to examine specific design aspects, as the creative elements that worked well on your website will likely function well in your advertisement as well.

Segment heatmaps

What about segment heatmaps?

With the help of segment heatmaps, you can figure out where the bulk of your traffic comes from. With this in mind, if you’re having trouble keeping track of your purchases, you can utilize this data to help you.

With these data visualization tools, you can really access a lot of useful data. But what about session replay?

Session replay

Session replay is a kind of data visualization tool too. It displays how your website’s users interact with it.

It shows you what visitors are watching, where they are clicking, and how much time they spend on each piece of information. As you can see, this information is highly important, especially if your goal is to improve your UX or the structure of your website.

With the help of session replay, you can figure out your:

– Well-performing CTAs

– Your visitors’ habits

– And the structure of your webpage

As you can see the session replay is also a perfect tool to analyze your website. The only question is, which one is worth using? Which gives more valuable information? Let’s see what the answer is.

Heatmaps vs session replay

Let’s get to the point. Which one should you use?

Basically, we can say that both tools are very useful. As you could read, both provide very important information about your website, so this is a difficult question.

If your goal is to get a more comprehensive view of your website and its frequently visited locations, then we strongly recommend that you use heatmaps. This will give you a comprehensive view of where your visitors are going in general and give you a clear idea of ​​which subpage is popular.

Also, we recommend heatmaps even if you may not be aware of exactly who your target audience is. You can find out this with the help of segment heatmaps.

With this information in mind, you will be able to advertise on effective platforms where there are people who might be interested in your website. So be sure to use heatmaps and not session replay at the beginning of developing a marketing campaign.

Session replay is already a much narrower form of analysis. We recommend that you use this analysis once the basics of your marketing campaign are in place and you are getting the creative part.

Through the analytics, you can find out which CTAs work for each group of your visitors and specifically what are the motives that grab people’s attention. This way you can create a perfect creative for your campaign.

If you listen to us, rely on session replay for a higher percentage when you want to optimize your website. This shows more detailed results about your users ’habits than heatmaps so you can optimize your website much better for your target audience.

But then which method of analysis is better? The answer is that both are just as good, it just doesn’t matter when you use them.

Heatmaps provide more general information and session replay is much more specific. However, both are very useful.

Conclusion

Using modern measurement tools is now essential if you run a website. Of course, there are many other data visualization tools besides heatmaps and session replay, but we believe they provide the most useful information.

We recommend that you use these two tools in parallel, so you don’t miss anything. Also, don’t forget to collect quantitative data. Always create a spreadsheet in which you keep the information so you can observe the trends.

We hope we can help.